Doctor Who and the Time Warrior by: Terrance Dicks

 

Doctor Who and the Time Warrior was written by Terrance Dicks, based on The Time Warrior by: Robert Holmes.  It was the 42^nd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

It’s sometimes a shame when a Terrance Dicks book doesn’t add much new to the original story and that’s essentially what happens with Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, adapting The Time Warrior.  While the book, and indeed the audiobook narrated by Jeremy Bulloch, does have all the charm of a Terrance Dicks book, this one seems almost like it was rushed.  With Dicks’ other works you can get a sense that care is taken to see what can be done to translate from screen to page and enrich some of the text with that usual charm.  For instance, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons both introduce new companions from their television stories and give them their own internal monologues and lives, as well as giving the villains of those stories some more depth.

 

Here, this is just a one to one translation of the television story onto the page except for the prologue.  The prologue is the only thing that deviates, showing Linx crashing into the Milky Way and eventually the Earth which does give the reader something about the Sontarans and Rutans which is great, but this was actually from the mind of Robert Holmes.  Holmes originally wished to write this book himself, but apparently only submitted three pages before Dicks was brought in to actually write the book.  There isn’t any indication that he was rushed, but outside of some very minor character notes, with the Doctor and the Brigadier having more interactions at the beginning, it feels like Dicks may have been rushed.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Time Warrior is simply inferior to its television counterpart, with the major issues coming from the fact that it doesn’t change enough to actually feel like a novelization.  All of the dialogue feels reproduced from the television story, which is very possible as it was released only four years from the initial broadcast so the tapes were there to watch.  It’s still decent, The Time Warrior is a great story even if this isn’t a great adaptation.  7/10.